Visit to LEGO and the LEGO Idea Conference in Billund Denmark

It was an inspiring visit to the LEGO Mindstorms headquarters in Billund Denmark. We exchanged in a very positive and encouraging discussion with several members of the LEGO Mindstorms team.  We presented ROILA including its motivation, design objectives and our initial experimental results. We informed them that we were now ready for application case studies, LEGO being one and autistic children being another option (actually LEGO considered the autism line very interesting as well). In addition, we gave a successful demo that showed the language in use with a NXT robot and ‘turtle’ semantics. In summary, the LEGO Mindstorms team was very enthusiastic about the project and we had a lively debate. Best of all, LEGO Mindstorms promised to help us and that they would publicize the ROILA project on their website and we promised to provide them with material to do that.

On April 13^th we were invited to participate in the one day LEGO Idea Conference 2010. We attended various inspiring workshops and lectures such as the lecture by Nicholas Negroponte on the one laptop per children initiative. Moreover, several speakers emphasized the importance of open ended play, creativity, learning by construction for children (and this could be an interesting element in our application case study, i.e. can children co-create the ROILA language?)